Tilting Toward Hope

The trend worldwide over the last two decades has been clear: democracy is slipping. Authoritarianism, anti-pluralism, and anti-institutionalism are all gaining strength.

Freedom House has charted 19 consecutive years of decline in democratic freedom around the globe, saying that, in the last year alone, 60 countries experienced a deterioration in political rights and civil liberties, while only 34 saw improvements.

A century ago, Europe and Asia were beginning a slide into totalitarianism. It took a World War to break authoritarianism’s hold, to usher in an era of constitutional democracy.

But the odds are always stacked against democracy. Millennia of world history have been heavily dominated by monarchical and authoritarian rule.

Hannah Arendt, the chronicler of totalitarianism, believed a core force that makes a society vulnerable to dictatorship is when individuals became more disconnected and isolated from one other. Separated, we are weak, and the state can take away our name, identity, and rights, reducing us to mere flesh. Isolated, we feel irrelevant and dispirited, leading us to put false hope in those with simplistic solutions to economic, social, and political woes.

Thus is our technologically-driven isolationism unhealthy for us as both individuals and democracies.

I submit all of this by way of perspective, to argue that what has been going on in Russia since 2000 is part of a larger whole – a worldwide tilt away from democracy that has steeper inclines in places like North Korea (see article, page 14), El Salvador, China, and Saudi Arabia, and more subtle tilts in the US, Hungary, or Singapore.

But the tilt, it is everywhere.

And each state will have to find its own way back onto level ground. For Russia, many seem to feel that a key turning point pivots on Putin’s mortality (see Language, page 10). But Arendt pointed out quite rightly that evil is banal and bureaucratic, that once you have a system that rewards backing the One True Idea, it is well primed to outlive its prophet. It takes far more than one person to run an autocracy. It takes millions of self-interested believers. And when you have an ideology based on a perceived injustice (see Karelia, page 50), it compounds the tragedy.

But, like the teachers in Siberia we read about in this issue (see page 40), we need to hold out hope. Hope that, for all our sake, there will be more children taught the value of goodness and decency. Of pluralism.

Meanwhile, this issue rounds out 30 years that we have been publishing this quirky little magazine. We could not have done it without you, our readers, and often I don’t understand how it happened at all.

Thank you.

Paul Richardson